As the race shifts towards Obama, you’ll hear a lot of things from the right about how it’s not their fault, how it’s just that Romney is a shitty candidate or how Obama bribed a majority of voters with big gubmint surplus cheese or how history shows that Americans always vote for the black guy.

One thing I wasn’t expecting to hear — though it’s a pretty obvious angle in retrospect — is that conservatives are happy that they’re losing because who would want to govern this country the next four years. With a continuing recessions and a new onslaught of Caretersque national malaise, a Democratic victory will give Republicans a chance to regroup, hit reset, etch-a-sketch themselves into something more appealing, and reconnect with voters who have become disenchanted with the libruls.

I can’t say that he’s wrong. Predictions are hard, especially about the future. But I can say: this is how losers talk. And here’s something bizarre: Stu Rothenberg wrote a column in 2008 about how bad it would be for Republicans if McCain won. Trende calls the piece “one of the more prescient things I’ve ever read on politics.” How can it be prescient when it’s speculation about the consequences of something that didn’t happen?

Trende finishes with the party-before-country nihilism that has come to define modern conservatism:

But if things don’t turn out for the best here, I sure wouldn’t want to be the one governing. Sometimes you really do win by losing.

Really? Although you think your ideas are better and that they’d ameliorate the coming crises, you’d rather the other side be there to take the blame, even if that means something terrible for the country you claim to love.

Oh Jesus, yes, this is loser talk, pre-emptive sour grapes about how this upcoming loss is good because it sets us up for an even bigger victory down the road. Horesehit. A loss is a loss, being out of power for four years is its own punishment, and thats four years of policy and issue shaping you miss out on (not to mention 1-3 Supreme Court picks and oversight of the implementation of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank).

I remember thinking, in the rubble of the 2004 result, that the Democrats might have been better off losing – that 2005-2008 was a poisoned chalice, that the debts for the Iraq war would come crashing down and the real estate bubble would burst, and it’s poetic justice that it should happen to the guy who set it all off. And in a way, that’s how it played out – the 2006 landslides, a final approval rating in the mid-20s, and Obama 2008. But you know what? We’d all have been better off under President Kerry.

If demographics are destiny, than the Repukes are toast. Not only because of ever growing numbers of immigrants and other typically Dem voters, but surprisingly, because of a higher ratio of women to men. I just read a fascinating article whose basic premise is anywhere there is an imbalance of men over women, you’ll have a more extreme society. The rise of the Wingnuts trends with an increase in the ratio of men to women.

That imbalance is receding and trends indicate it will continue to do so for the next 10-20 years. Ergo, we may well indeed be at Peak Wingnut right now, and that tide is rolling back.

really? if that was the case and they truly believed that this is a shitty situation that was beyond “winning” why engage in such a scorched earth politics for the last four years, why not be “gracious” and offer the hand of bipartisanship and watch them fail and take the “moral high ground” about proving how they are just tax and spend folks that can’t get it right and we acted in the best interests of the country and now its “our turn”. bullshit

I totally disagree with the premise that conservatives are better off losing because the next four years are going to be rough sledding. Primarily because the next four years are going to be relatively prosperous no matter who controls the White House. Oh, the GOP can destroy our long-term financial viability with an Iran War and major tax cut, but the reason the conservatives have gone all-in is that the business cycle is very likely to swing up.

Conservatives want the credit for the upcoming boom after four years of bust, which they can blame on Obama and the Dems, no matter how unfair that is. They really don’t want to see jobs created, recessions ended, budgets balanced and peace in the world, IOW the Obama agenda. If Obama turns this economy around, they are in a world of hurt for a generation, and they know it.

This is their last chance for power with their current agenda, they know it, and they are beyond frustrated as they see it slipping away.

Really? Although you think your ideas are better and that they’d ameliorate the coming crises, you’d rather the other side be there to take the blame, even if that means something terrible for the country you claim to love.

I imagine that most of them know perfectly well that their ideas are not “better” and would do nothing to “ameliorate the coming crises.” They’re just pissy that their long con appears to have failed for the moment and they’re just reorienting to set up the next long con.

I have two separate things to say so maybe I’ll just make one point. I think all this talk about the 99% vs the 1 percent has been very, very, clarifying for the wealthy in this country. They now truly understand what they only suspected before. They don’t want the responsibility of running this country. Hell, even Mitt himself is just an errand boy and the hired help for the real power in this country. They just want to be able to turn the spigot on and off for what they want from the public trough, and prevent democracy from, as they see it, picking their pockets.

I think we will see an end to trying to spend a lot of money to elect a president at all–and therefore an end to backing the Republican party with a capital R. The think tanks are already largely focused on promoting Randianism rather than religion. They only needed to promoste religion because sex and gays brought out an otherwise usefully economically illiterate and economically submissive set of voters. Money will turn towards key races in the Senate and the House and will be used to buy lower level errand boys, like Ryan, who are not independently wealthy or politically motivated by their own aspirations and ideologies but who will serve at the behest of their masters shamelessly and without memory for previous commitments.

And the very wealthy will simply withdraw even farther into their gated communities.

I guess the question really becomes “if you’re so convinced that running the country for the next few years will be a disaster for your political movement, while the hell are you fielding a candidate?” Why not save all the umpteen million dollars sucked down by the Romney campaign, put them towards buying canned goods and rifle ammunition, and prepare for the coming Zombie Apocalypse?

But I can say: this is how losers talk… the party-before-country nihilism that has come to define modern conservatism…

Interesting observations. I’ve heard similar talk among extreme liberals of the “Obama is worse than Bush” variety. Some say that a really, really horrible Republican administration will wake up the country, and then we’ll start voting in liberal Democrats (or Greens, or whatever). Sometimes I argue, sometimes I just shake my head. Nihilism is right.

I don’t know Sean Trende but I gave the linked article a read and also read his own self linked article on how Obamacare is doomed because it “picks winners and losers” in a way that Medicare and SS don’t. I can’t figure out whether he is literally the stupidest man who ever lived, or just kind of metaphorically the stupidest man who ever lived. He seems to have zero idea how Obamacare was or will be paid for and he does not have any idea how many people in this country have pre-existing conditions or would like to keep their kids on their insurance plan although he himself has a pre-existing condition and has a child with pre-existing conditions. So he thinks there won’t be any generic buy in to Obamacare and willingness to protect it after it really gets going because those stakeholders are too few (what? Every single adult with children under 26 is too small a population to count?) to matter.

And here’s something bizarre: Stu Rothenberg wrote a column in 2008 about how bad it would be for Republicans if McCain won. Trende calls the piece “which is one of the more prescient things I’ve ever read on politics.”

If McCain had won, he would have been able to appoint 2 Supreme Court Judges and have strong conservative majority in that court for a generation. There also would be no ACA and most likely a war with Iran.

The same can be said now. Both Ginsburg and Kennedy may retire the next 4 years. The GOP would love to replace them with more conservative justices.

One thing I wasn’t expecting to hear—though it’s a pretty obvious angle in retrospect—is that conservatives are happy that they’re losing because who would want to govern this country the next four years. With a continuing recessions and a new onslaught of Caretersque national malaise, a Democratic victory will give Republicans a chance to regroup, hit reset, etch-a-sketch themselves into something more appealing, and reconnect with voters who have become disenchanted with the libruls.

I remember thinking, in the rubble of the 2004 result, that the Democrats might have been better off losing – that 2005-2008 was a poisoned chalice, that the debts for the Iraq war would come crashing down and the real estate bubble would burst, and it’s poetic justice that it should happen to the guy who set it all off. And in a way, that’s how it played out – the 2006 landslides, a final approval rating in the mid-20s, and Obama 2008. But you know what? We’d all have been better off under President Kerry

Amen. I thought the same thing in 2004; hell, I know people who voted for Bush because they thought he should have to “face up” to the results of what he’d done. And its crap logic, Kerry would have at least attempted to head off the worst of the shitstorm heading down the pike, rather than doubling down or ignoring it.

The writer doesn’t seem to realize that conservatives would still “win” if the Repukes hold the House. Gridlock and stasis favors the already wealthy at this point, especially those connected to the fossil fuel and banking industries. But that outcome has been looking less likely over the past week or two, and another couple of bad weeks for the RYAN/romney ticket will put Nancy SMASH back in charge.

At this point it is about taking the House. That is all that any blogs should be focusing on, all that any of us should be focusing on. If the GOP holds the House, then this strategy makes sense, b/c blaming the GOP for obstruction is a weak substitute for actually getting things done.

They’re just pissy that their long con appears to have failed for the moment and they’re just reorienting to set up the next long con.

If you are doing this, by definition you are running the short con, not the long con. This is important for understanding the conservative mind. They’re not diabolical geniuses, they’re morons fighting a scorched earth retreat. They had one long con, a set of lies that were mostly about economic policy Ronald Reagan sold the country. As it dissolves, they have no replacement.

A Kerry win might have helped in Iraq, but I don’t think people who could change anything understood the financial crisis that was looming — it would have happened anyway. And, short of being willing to have government takeover bankrupt banks, I don’t think the immediate response of Kerry would have been much different than Bush’s.

@gnomedad: Perhaps he is speaking more of the movement towards ending the imbalance of power of men vs women. Look at the shift of women in politics, in the workforce, in CEO & business ownership positions over the past 50 years. Look especially at how women in power are spoken of & written about. Things are changing, mainly for the better.

@gnomedad: The article (“Sex and the Society” was in the print version of this month’s Discover Magazine. I can’t find the article on their website. It was based on work by Harvard social psychologist Marcia Guttentag.

I thought this was why they ran McCain. They wanted a Dem to inherit the steaming shit pile Bush 2 left and then sweep in on waves of adoration in 2012 to thunderous applause for saving the country from the evil Dems.
That they are willing to heave over 2012 and wait for 2016 amazes me, but that’s what I am seeing. Romney loses, Jeb gets his chance, and we start the Bush era thing all the fuck over again.

that is an interesting thought, that the upper crust might just gradually withdraw and stop trying to control our politics and our lives.

Doubtful. Their main thrust right now seems to be suppressing Democratic votes. They may be realistic enough to have given up on a majority of electoral votes for Romney, given that every day the race gets more difficult to steal. But the fact that they’re plowing full ahead on a variety of state-level voter suppression tactics anyway tells me that they like their chances of stealing downticket races (the better to block progressive efforts from the White House) and especially state legislatures, which is of course where they have the most impact in terms of normalizing further voter suppression . . .

I think they might stop trying to run things overtly from the top and rely on lobbyists, bought legislators and ALEC-type legislation to run things from the shadows. But no way do they willingly give up control.

@patrick II: True, lots of the basics of the financial crisis were baked in at that point. Still, it could only have helped, in 2006 & on, to have someone who would be responsive & realistic, rather than head-in-the-sand ignoring warning signs.

Also too, Katrina. Not that anything could have been done at that point to fix the levees & save the structural city of New Orleans, but we wouldn’t have had the world-wide shame of watching thousands of our fellow citizens suffering; hundreds dying, on TV as our federal government ignored them.

Its not that I think they will stop trying to control the government and the treasury, its that I think they won’t bother to do it through trying to put one of their own into the Presidency. They will simply run fully paid for stealth candidates farther down the ticket and try to control the public purse that way. Really, what good does the presidency do them? Its hugely expensive and they have just seen that they can’t manage to sell their ideas in the bright light of the election. That’s the real lesson of this election cycle. They need to wrap their economic needs and demands more tightly in a better package. Mitt was the apotheosis of the financial wing of the republican party, the money party, and he can’t sell it nationally. They will retool and get a better return on their investment by investing heavily in the red state/small state senators and blue dogs.

It’s that old ploy used by rejected daters everywhere: “Well, I didn’t want to go out on a date with you anyway.” Nice job Trende.

But since Republicans don’t actually govern, I can see why they think it’s to their advantage that Democrats have another four years to fix things first. Repubs can’t loot the treasury if Democrats don’t get the chance to put money in there first.

@Gindy53:
I don’t think the toxicity of the bush name will be gone enough in 16 to allow jeby to run. There are too many of us who think that genetic strain is seriously damaged. He’ll have to wait till, maybe 24 to run and he’ll be too old then. Cause if I’m around I’ll do my best to make sure no one forgets his brother’s clusterfuck of a job.

Maybe it’s just me but doesn’t the current rethug party look like a cult?

@aimai: The GOP certainly has had a lot of success moving their agenda forward in the red states already. Who needs the presidency when they’ve gotten what they want already?

Also, at the risk of sounding like a concern troll, what makes anyone think Obama’s picks for SCOTUS will be confirmed? How many federal judges have been appointed so far? What’s the backlog? Sure, traditionally, the prez gets what he wants on SCOTUS, but the GOP has been tossing out tradition on a major scale since Bush was selected. I have no doubt they’ll block any openings and run out the clock until they get another one of theirs into office.

@Smiling Mortician:
It tells me they’re desperate because they know they’ll never have this much power again, it wasn’t enough to give them more than stopgaps, and they’re watching this power slip through their fingers with no way to stop it. Voter suppression is the tactic of racists scraping the bottom of the barrel of ways of keeping power that stopped working decades ago. If clever strategists were in charge of the Republican Party right now, Romney would not be losing. Romney would not be the candidate. None of the circumstances that made Romney the candidate would have happened. They really, truly are as dumb as they look.

Don’t stop ’em if they want to talk themselves into losing. I think there’s a good chance that the big money and influence will shift towards Obama if he wins in a convincing enough manner, because America likes a winner. Right now, we’re in the Jackie Robinson phase. Soon it will be old news.

In other words, Schumer may be right. Most rich folks want stability. Right now, a lot of the big money and power is standing on the sidelines,waiting to see what happens, and lot of the money backing Romney is rogue wealth, guys like Adelson and the Koch Bros, guys with ego issues, axes to grind or who benefit from quirks in the economic structure that give them rentier status. A lot of the big money is not like that, however. They want results, and it increasingly looks like Obama is more likely to deliver that, considering long term demographics and world trends.

Republicans, while offering quick rip-off profits, ultimately are a proposition with a low long-term ROI. They’re dragging out stale ideological bullshit from long-dead Russian emigre wackos and getting booed at the AARP. Bush and McCain provided the latest examples that maybe they don’t make White Presidents like they used to, and Mitt’s clusterfuck of a campaign is the next teachable moment. Let the shitshow failparade roll on.

@amused: I’ve long been of the opinion that we should have taken the fuckers up on their “nuclear option” rhetoric to begin with. The entire purpose of the house was to be a check on the senate, just as the senate was a check on the house. The idea that we need even further ability for a minority of members to block majority action? Bullshit. That’s what elections are for.

@Pen: Exactly. I can understand the fear that the GOP will abuse the lack of filibuster, but we’ve already seen how they’ll abuse any process to get what they want. Hamstringing ourselves out of fear hasn’t done anyone any good.

@amused: I see a lot of the “rolling over” Dem behavior as rooted in disbelief. A lot of crap and bribery, yes, but also flat out disbelief.

For decades there were gentlemen and agreements. There was your turn/our turn. Newt Gingrich and gang started overturning that, and it was probably the same slow process that happens when a close relative starts losing their grip.

Denial is a powerful thing and it can, from the outside, make you look like an utterly clueless idiot.

Plus, lots of politics is still local. Huge megacorporations might find it necessary to have the entire national government in their pockets. But for anything smaller than that, it’s probably enough to have a few senators and congressmen from the parts of the country where your company is based under your thumb.

@WereBear: I noticed that “rollover” when Bush was in office and kept getting away with stuff I thought was illegal. Nope, just “it’s always been done this way.” Cheney knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it after Watergate and Iran-Contra. I was frikkin’ flabbergasted.

Remember the Texas redistricting fiasco, when the Dems took off for OK for a few months. There wasn’t any “law” that said “no redistricting until the census,” so the GOP went ahead and did it. There’s a lot of damage they can still do until all those holes are plugged, but it takes all the running we can do to stay in one place, so no one’s standing by with the spackle. Pretty scary, but whaddayagonnado?

I do not want to sound like a tin pot dictator but I hope Obama’s taking names and punishes these SOBS when he wins his second term
all in a very legal and ethical way .
,I am looking at you Sheldon adelson.

If clever strategists were in charge of the Republican Party right now, Romney would not be losing.

It’s not about un-clever strategists, it’s about un-clever voters. A clever strategist right now would be reaching out to the growing demographics in order to guarantee themselves a future, which is what Bush was doing. But the teabagger base won’t allow anyone who does that to go past the primary, so right now the GOP looks like it’s set to expire like a cheap milk carton.

@Chris:
If there was organized, intelligent planning behind the GOP, these un-clever voters would not be in charge. The clowns are running the circus. The GOP establishment encouraged this disaster every step of the way, by being clowns themselves until the few nominally competent planners were out in the cold. There’s no cabal, no long-term plan. There’s just panicked sheep in rainbow colored afros and tears painted next to their eyes.

I think the main problem is simply that you can’t govern as a conservative (e.g. someone who wants more power and profit to the elites) by running on anything that’s good for the public. So if you want to be competitive in elections, you pretty much have to cultivate those demographics of truly insane motherfuckers, like the people who were way out on the fringes worshiping Ayn Rand, Robert Welch or Joe McCarthy back in the fifties. But then you tie yourself to people with no conception of “enlightened self interest,” and they’ll eventually take you down with you.

The most extreme example of this in the modern age was the elites who encouraged the rise of fascism as a hired thug against liberalism and the left, only to have their dog slip off the leash, go completely fucking nuts and leave everything in ruins.

True. Flip side of the coin is that it will be somewhat more difficult for the House wingnuts to claim that they’re really obeying the will of the peepul by obstructing the guy who just was elected to a second term. Oh, they’ll do it anyway, but they’ll catch a lot more shit for doing it. Obama will have them out at the end of a limb, and the only thing he’ll hand them is a saw.

And, as has been noted by others, in the long term the Republicans are doomed anyway – too many internal contradictions and not enough angry white guys. To win at the national level they have to appeal to at least some black and Latino folks, but the Republican base will not stand for any substantive moves to broaden the party’s appeal to Those People. The likes of Louie Gohmert and Michelle Bachmann, let alone Sarah Palin, are not going to win any Latino or black votes – ever. The Republican Party has painted itself into a corner, and there’s no getting out without tearing the party apart and/or becoming a regional party irrelevant at the national level.

If the Dems run someone like one of the Castro brothers in 2016, it won’t even be close.

Amen. I thought the same thing in 2004; hell, I know people who voted for Bush because they thought he should have to “face up” to the results of what he’d done. And its crap logic, Kerry would have at least attempted to head off the worst of the shitstorm heading down the pike, rather than doubling down or ignoring it.

That includes my mother, who has voted Republican twice in her life. Once for Nixon’s second term and once for W’s second term. Good going, Mom.

It took way too long, but the lies are gaping open like unhealed wounds. We didn’t get that wild prosperity, striding Colossus, and happy sitcom times that were promised.

Instead, most of us got sacked like a village hosting a Mongol horde.

The best thing what I try to foster regarding Republicans is a sense of betrayal. We were lied to, abused, used, and abandoned. Please! Turn that abundant resentment onto the right target for a change!

The fanatics that run the Republican Party are just that, fanatics. It is a religion with them. Now, it’s easier for some of ’em as they combine their delusions of grandeur regarding the utopian Christian paradise that the fanatics say they want with their political fanaticism. They’re really the same even when they aren’t the crazy Christians. Their fanaticism has tied them together for their dreams of greater glory.

Thank God most Americans aren’t them. So why does the media act like they are the true ‘Mericans? Probably because the right tells them that’s what they are and the media is the best stenographer money can buy.

Baby Jesus cries when he thinks about these lunatics running around claiming to be acting in his name. Bless us all.

I hate to be the pessimist in the room, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has the race tied. Even if Obama is moving ahead in key states, it’s only by a small margin; small enough to be easily reversed.

It’s important not to become convinced that just because Romney is one of the worst political candidates ever, he can’t still win the election. Millions of American voters are fickle, uninformed, misinformed, and many are just plain stupid.

Probably the worst thing that could happen to Obama supporters at this point is over-confidence. This race is going to be decided on election day and between now and then it’s important for Democrats to behave as though every single vote and dollar is vital — because that’s true.

I hate to be the pessimist in the room, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has the race tied. Even if Obama is moving ahead in key states, it’s only by a small margin; small enough to be easily reversed.

It’s important not to become convinced that just because Romney is one of the worst political candidates ever, he can’t still win the election. Millions of American voters are fickle, uninformed, misinformed, and many are just plain stupid.

Probably the worst thing that could happen to Obama supporters at this point is over-confidence. This race is going to be decided on election day and between now and then it’s important for Democrats to behave as though every single vote and dollar is vital — because that’s true.

I’m still seeing a fair amount of “the race is still tied; all the polls are oversampling Democrats by nine points.”

What gives them cover to say this is Rasmussen and Gallup; both tracking polls show Obama’s convention bounce completely gone and the race tied up. They disagree with every other poll in the universe, but Gallup in particular has a good reputation, so people pay attention to it.

I remember thinking, in the rubble of the 2004 result, that the Democrats might have been better off losing – that 2005-2008 was a poisoned chalice, that the debts for the Iraq war would come crashing down and the real estate bubble would burst, and it’s poetic justice that it should happen to the guy who set it all off. And in a way, that’s how it played out – the 2006 landslides, a final approval rating in the mid-20s, and Obama 2008. But you know what? We’d all have been better off under President Kerry.

I definitely remember people saying that. Pissed me off then, still does, and it pisses me off that the Republicans are saying it, especially since we know their agenda should Obama win will be ‘block everything and fuck the government.’

It’s better for the Republicans if Obama wins, because Obama will just implement their policies anyway. They get the best of both worlds–they get their horrible policies implemented, and the left gets blamed for the consequences.

If Trende is right, why doesn’t he advise Koch and ilk to stop investing so much $$$ into Romneybot’s losing campaign? I would love to not have to change the channel everytime one of their lying ads comes on.

Seems to me you’re correct and the Republican analysis fails here because we’ve reached a new point in the cycle of election/corruption/incompetence/voter disillusionment/re-election.

The Republicans are now nakedly talking about putting into place a breathtakingly savage array of absolutely cannibalistic and insane policies. They’re openly boasting that they’ll pump up the already bizarrely bloated U.S. military budget by 15%, shut down welfare, repeal Obamacare, end medicare, and so on. In previous election cycles, the Republicans were always careful to conceal their true inentions — viz., Ronald Reagan’s honeyed words about “morning in America” as a mask for his true agenda of tax cuts on the rich, slashing welfare, cranking up military spending, and so on.

The Republican agenda is so brutally sadistic and so frankly crazy (slashing the deficit in the midst of a gigantic global economic collapse is exactly the same self-destructive economic policy that Herbert Hoover’s secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon advocated, and which led to near-total-collapse of the U.S. economy twixt 1929 and 1932) that even the most partisan conservatives can no longer bring themselves to support these lunatic Republican policies.

Moreover, the Republican party seems to be growing more extreme and even crazier with each new defeat. So it’s hard to tell how this works out, but one thing we can be certain of: short of mass voter disenfrachisement or an overt coup, the general population is simply not on board with Republicans anymore. Republican policies have become so nakedly toxic and, as Romney’s candidacy shows, their politicians have become so straightforwardly contemptuous for the bottom 99%, that it’s hard to envision even the most devoted bully worshipers voting Republican in serious numbers nowadays.

The American people have always been a nation of cowards and craven toadies, but even the most sniveling yes-man has a sense of self preservation. And it looks like we’ve reached that point now. It’s really really hard to convince the average person to strangle himself to death, no matter how eloquent your argument.

Bullshit. Four years from now demographics are going to kill these goobers. This is the last chance for The White People’s Party. They know that. That is what has been driving the over the top Obama is the devil lunacy. They need to have in incumbent in 2016.